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...or you could switch the refresh mode to "Manual" to avoid any nodes cooking automatically. You can find it right next to the brain icon in the bottom right corner. It will only cook the thing if you hit the refresh button. super useful for heavy scenes.

another helpful thing you can do is to disable displaying of "Current geometry" in Viewport Display Options. Current geometry is a node that is selected but does not necessarily have a display flag on it. So in some node trees, whenever you select something, Houdini starts recomputing that part of a network as it wants to display it together with a display flag node. Generally it's useful, but in heavy scenes this can become a real drag and turning it off can improve interactivity a lot if you're working with big networks. (It's in Viewport Display Options>Guides, in top right area. You can access the dialogue by pressing D while hovering mouse over the viewport)

you can't avoid "freezing" Houdini while it's cooking nodes thou - you would end up stuck in an endless re-cooking loop of your last actions, without ever finishing it, until you allow enough time to actually compute the result - which is exactly the "freeze time" you're experiencing.